..."pour new wine into freshly prepared wineskins, and in this way both are preserved..." Matthew 9:17
This is the ongoing story of our Torah school journey, family projects, crafts, holidays, and teaching life skills to my fresh wineskins...

Saturday, September 24, 2011

the Torah in your heart... (Parashah Nitzavim-Vayeilech)

Pertaining to Parashah Nitzavim (Deuteronomy 29:9-30:20)

and Vayeilech (Deuteronomy 31:1-20)

This seemed like a busy week for us in Torah school. To start off, we learned "The Listening Song" which we will continue to sing. (It's from an educational e-book I downloaded from Scholastic's Teacher Express website.)Since our theme was counting this week, we also sang "Alice the Camel (has 5 humps)" and "Five Little Monkeys."To learn numbers and counting, we played "Egg Carton Shake" which I read about here but I tweaked it by simply using numbers in each egg compartment, so when we shook the button into one, we learned what number it was. In the future, I also will try to get her to put the correct amount of pony beads into the numbers that we know so far, but she was much more interested in just shaking the beads in the carton to see where they ended up! :)

We also completed "Dora's Counting Activity Book," which you can print free here from nickjr.com. I was actually surprised at how well she did with these pages, which included counting particular items in a picture and circling them. She loved it because it had Dora on it, of course! Also, for counting, and specifically this week we focused on the number three, she completed this number three worksheet.

We did several activities for the letter C, including making a cute caterpillar using pom-poms and a popsicle stick "branch" for him to sit on and gluing pony bead circles onto the letter C. For developing motor skills, we have started "practicing cutting" with scissors, which my daughter finds both fascinating and frustrating at the same time! We used the "What's in the Grass?" worksheet and the same website also has many others for learning to cut. Our sensory activity this week (the bubble balls are still sitting in the tub) was the "C" Bag, which was simply a brown paper sack I filled with items that begin with C. I had her close her eyes and take one out at a time so we could sing each one to the tune of "Farmer in the Dell" (i.e. "Car starts with C, car starts with C, the letter C, car starts with C") She really enjoyed it, so we did it more than once and I will use it for future letters as well.

Our Torah verse this week was from Deuteronomy 30:14: "[G-d's] word is very close to you -- in your mouth, even in your heart; therefore, you can do it!" We talked about having the Torah in your heart and used the parashah coloring pages from Nitzavim-Vayeilech from aish.com and also one from next week's Ha'azinu, depicting a child learning Torah. We made a collage using the Torah, the child studying, and the stars, etc. and also circled his mouth and glued on his heart to illustrate the verse as we talked about it.

This week, we also began spending a little more time on our Hebrew letter, bet. We have been using the printable pages from www.akhlah.com for each letter, but this week we cut the bet out and put it on a cutout I had of a school, because the worksheets have three words that start with bet, and the words were: beit sefer (school), beit (house), and boker (morning). On the other side of the school, we glued this house worksheet and glued the Hebrew word for house over the English, and also made a sun out of scrap paper for "morning". She drowned the poor thing with glue, so it was fun for her! She also tried to say the Hebrew words, so as we go on, I will incorporate more of this for the Hebrew vocabulary.

We also began our "13 Things I Know About G-d" lesson, making our sun craft, which I mentioned here if you have not read that post yet, and talking about G-d's attribute of LOVE. I found a cute family portrait picture that I made a cardstock frame for. I asked my daughter who G-d loved in the picture, and let her put a heart stamp next to each one, and circle them, even the puppy! ;) We also wrote the verse, "G-d is Love" from 1 John 4:8. This picture will go on on "school wall" along with the "13 Things I know About G-d" sun, so that we can add our other projects as we cover His other attributes.

My Most Popular Posts

Followers

About Me

I am a messianic wife and mother of two learning to serve G-d through prayer, study, and lifestyle. We have lived in Brooklyn for over four years now, where my husband has attained his master's degree at the Feinberg Center for Messianic Jewish Studies. We have recently relocated to the highly orthodox neighborhood of Midwood, Brooklyn, which is sure to be life-changing...